Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was back in New Hampshire on Monday, where he shared his views on cellulosic biofuels and oil drilling in North Dakota with local talk show host Al Kulas:

Al: “You mentioned in your talk that in Iowa unemployment was 2% because everybody was drilling oil…”

Newt: “No, no, no… in North Korea… North Dakota…”

Al: “Did some of the farmers realize that rather than wasting the value of their land growing corn for ethanol, they should take the corn out of it and drill for oil?”

Newt: “Actually, I think the part of North Dakota that produces oil is winter wheat country, but the farmers out there seem pretty darn happy with the amount of royalties that they’re getting out of the wells that are being drilled now…”

Al: “If I said, ‘Corn is food. Soy beans should be used for ethanol,’ what would you say?”

Newt: “Well, I think there are new technologies that allow you to use corn stalks and corn husks and other things. I am in favor of developing some biofuels and I think it can be done in a way that doesn’t affect the cost of food at all.”

A full video of the interview is available on YouTube (the energy part starts at the 4:00 mark)

For the record, North Dakota does have the lowest unemployment rate in the nation – 3.7% as of February 2011. However, chalking the state’s economic success up to oil alone is kind of like saying soy beans aren’t food.

Not surprisingly, the American Petroleum Institute (API) claims that oil and natural gas support 27,914 jobs in the Peace Garden State. API admits this figure includes the number of food service jobs supported by the industries’ employees. So if an oil field worker in North Dakota buys a Big Mac, API takes credit for creating a job flipping burgers. Unless Big Oil hired a small army of statisticians to follow employees to lunch, this sounds like fuzzy math. There is little evidence to suggest that oil field workers would stop buying Big Macs if they changed jobs and started putting up wind turbines.

Newt’s comments got me thinking about green jobs in North Dokata. It turns out the state is already home to 137 clean energy businesses and 2,112 clean energy jobs, according to a groundbreaking Pew Charitable Trust report. Pew researches didn’t just camp out at McDonald’s. They actually went out and counted the number of jobs created by green companies that are busy building America’s clean energy future.

It is nice to see Newt Gingrich taking even a short break from the “Drill baby Drill” rhetoric of the Republican Party establishment. Seems like just yesterday that Newt was busy co-starring in TV ads for the “We can solve it” campaign.

“We do agree our country must take action to solve climate change,” he said in this 2008 video, Nancy Pelosi at his side.

What happened?

One explanation is that the former Speaker of the House underwent a change of heart the moment a Democrat landed in the White House. Another explanation is that Newt is simply reacting to the propaganda being pumped out of Big Oil funded think tanks in Washington.

In 2009, researchers at the University of Massachusetts found that federal cap and trade legislation could create up to 4,000 new jobs in North Dakota. The idea was so terrifying to oil giants like Exxon Mobile and Koch Industries that they quickly whipped up some statistics of their own. “Beware cap-and-trade” read one 2010 Bismark Tribune headline. The accompanying article warned that enactment of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) could kill 5,000 to 7,000 jobs in North Dakota alone, while also jacking up the price of gasoline by 24%, electricity 64%, and natural gas 77%.

Where do these terrifying numbers come from? It turns out they come from a report compiled by the America Council for Capital Formation, a Washington, D.C. based 501(c)(3) funded in part by none other than Exxon Mobile and Koch Industries. Exxon alone has donated $1,674,523 to the group since 1998. Koch kicked in another $215,000 from 2005 to 2008.

Big Oil’s misinformation campaign could not have been better timed. ACES had just become the first piece of federal climate legislation to make it out of the House of Representatives and was awaiting a vote in the U.S. Senate – a vote that would never come.

With these kinds of numbers flying around, you can’t blame ol’ Newt for backing down from his past support for bipartisan climate action. In 2012, it will be up to us voters to let politicians know that “We the People” still support clean energy solutions that create green jobs and curb greenhouse gas emissions.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-04-06-2012-election-newt-gingrich-talks-energy-in-new-hampshire/feed/0Koch-funded group mounts cut-and-paste attack on regional climate initiativeshttp://grist.org/climate-policy/2011-03-16-koch-group-alec-cut-paste-attack-regional-climate-initiatives/
http://grist.org/climate-policy/2011-03-16-koch-group-alec-cut-paste-attack-regional-climate-initiatives/#commentsWed, 16 Mar 2011 12:24:40 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-16-koch-group-alec-cut-paste-attack-regional-climate-initiatives/]]>Fresh off last year’s successful defeat of federal climate legislation in the U.S. Senate, the oil baron Koch brothers and their dirty-energy buddies are now bent on dismantling one of the nation’s last hopes for doing anything about climate change in the near term: regional climate accords.

Today, a total of 32 states are active participants or observing members in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast, the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, or the Western Climate Initiative.

ALEC offers legislative templates to state lawmakers who don’t want the hassle of writing their own conservative bills. Raegan Weber, ALEC’s senior director of public affairs, says the group has produced 800 to 1,000 pieces of so-called “model legislation.” Access to those templates is restricted to legislators who pay $100 for a two-year membership, which makes it difficult to trace a bill’s language back to ALEC.

But thanks to a blog post by a conservative states-rights activist in Florida (and a tidbit in one of ALEC’s own press releases), we can make out at least part of what’s in ALEC’s template for “State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives,” one of the offerings on the group’s environment webpage. And it looks like the template has been getting a lot of use lately.

Language that regurgitates all of the right’s favorite — and in many cases fallacious — anti-cap-and-trade talking points has cropped up in nearly identical form in resolutions or bills in at least six states:

WHEREAS, there has been no credible economic analysis of the costs associated with carbon reduction mandates and the consequential effect of the increasing costs of doing business in the State of ______;

WHEREAS, forcing business, industry, and food producers to reduce carbon emissions through government mandates and cap-and-trade policies under consideration for the regional climate initiative will increase the cost of doing business, push companies to do business with other states or nations, and increase consumer costs for electricity, fuel, and food;

WHEREAS, the Congressional Budget Office warns that the cost of cap-and-trade policies will be borne by consumers and will place a disproportionately high burden on poorer families;

WHEREAS, simply reducing carbon emissions in the State of ______ will not have a significant impact on international carbon reduction, especially while countries like China, Russia, Mexico, and India emit an ever-increasing amount of carbon into the atmosphere;

WHEREAS, a tremendous amount of economic growth would be sacrificed for a reduction in carbon emissions that would have no appreciable impact on global concentrations of CO2;

WHEREAS, no state or nation has enhanced economic opportunities for its citizens or increased Gross Domestic Product through cap and trade or other carbon reduction policies; and

WHEREAS, Europe’s cap and trade system has been undermined by political favoritism, accounting tricks and has failed to achieve the carbon reduction targets,

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the legislature of the State of ______ urges the Governor to withdraw [state] from the regional climate initiative.

Last year in Michigan, the language appeared in a resolution [PDF] introduced in the state House of Representatives, demanding that the state drop out of the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord.

This year, the language has shown up in resolutions in Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington [PDFs] calling for the states to quit the Western Climate Initiative.

In New Hampshire, it popped up in the “findings” section of a House bill that would repeal the cap-and-trade system established under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The bill’s lead sponsor, state Rep. Richard Barry (R), looked a bit like a dog caught with the family cat in its mouth when he was asked to explain the language at a public hearing; he nervously said that none of the bill’s sponsors had written this particular section, but stopped short of revealing ALEC as the source of the text. That didn’t sit well with Rep. James Garrity (R), chair of the House Science, Technology, and Energy Committee, who later explained, “Our committee does not feel that editorials belong in laws.” The matter was resolved by dropping the ALEC text, and the amended bill went on to pass the House.

The New Mexico resolution hasn’t fared so well; it stalled in committee, according to sponsor Rep. Tim Lewis (R). Unlike Barry in New Hampshire, Lewis readily acknowledges that the language in his resolution came from ALEC, but adds, “I am not a member of that group.” A first-term legislator who’s still busy learning the ropes in Santa Fe, Lewis admits he didn’t put much time into examining ALEC’s claims about cap-and-trade. As a teacher, he might be unhappy to learn the copycat text is full of questionable claims (find out just how questionable).

“I don’t mind being an observer in the Western Climate Initiative,” says Lewis, who is proud to support wind and solar power. He says he just worries that implementing cap-and-trade policies could hurt poor families in his state. Sound familiar?

Oregon state Rep. Kim Thatcher (R), sponsor of the resolution in her state, seems to be more thoroughly on board with the Koch brothers’ agenda. An aide to the lawmaker, who spoke on condition of not being named, said Thatcher contacted all the right groups before moving forward with the resolution, including: Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-funded organization that has been waging a very public assault on regional climate accords (get that story); the Heritage Foundation, recipient of more than $3.3 million in Koch funds from 1997 to 2008; and the Cascade Policy Institute, considered by Koch Industries to be one of the few reputable sources of information on “climate controversies.” For now, the resolution is stuck in committee.

In 2010, Greenpeace published a report about the Koch brothers’ funding of climate-denial groups, and Koch Industries responded by saying, “we believe science — not politicized opinion — must play a central role in the discussion about climate and related policy proposals. Both a free society and the scientific method require an open and honest airing of all sides.”

Can we look forward to an open airing of the ALEC text that’s being surreptitiously slipped into state-level bills and resolutions around the country? And will we see the text corrected so that it is in fact honest and all “politicized opinion” is removed?